A pronoun lawsuit
Uh oh. Is Nike a TERF?
A transgender former Nike contractor is seeking $1.1 million in damages from the sporting goods giant for allegedly allowing gender identity-based harassment.
According to a civil lawsuit filed this week, Nike and Mainz Brady Group, a staffing firm that hired workers for Nike, discriminated against computer engineer Jazz Lyles, who identifies as transmasculine and prefers the pronouns they/them/their. The complaint was filed with Multnomah Circuit Court in Oregon.
What does “transmasculine” mean? How is it different from trans male? Is a trans man “transmasculine”? Is that just another way of saying Jazz Lyles identifies as male? Or is it different? Does they merely prefer the pronouns they/them/their, or does they require them? It sounds as if they requires them, seeing as how they is suing.
During Lyles’ tenure at Nike — from May 2017 to September 2018 — the engineer was repeatedly “misgendered” by coworkers, the complaint said. While Lyles notified management about the issue multiple times, the companies allegedly failed to implement any policies, procedures and trainings around the use of gender pronouns in the workplace.
Could it be that the coworkers just forgot? It’s actually not all that easy to remember to override your perceptions every single time you refer to Special Person X, and people at work tend to have other things to think of, more pressing things that are closely related to their paychecks. It’s also not absolutely clear that Nike or any other company should be wasting training time on telling employees to memorize counter-intuitive pronouns for a growing list of special employees.
“When someone refuses to acknowledge a person’s gender identity or insists on referring to them by a gender to which they do not identify (called misgendering), this causes real and significant harm,” read the complaint.
Ah. It’s interesting that you say that, because no it doesn’t. It doesn’t cause real or significant harm. Having a special bespoke pronoun is just a stupid narcissistic demand on others, and their failure to comply causes no harm at all – it might even do some good, by instructing the pronoun-haver in what all adults should have a healthy awareness of: the fact that Them is not more special than other people, and Them can’t put extra burdens on other people as a way of forcing them to pay increased attention to Special Them.
“Employers like Nike have a responsibility to present a safe workplace and ensure that employees respect their coworkers’ gender pronouns,” Shenoa Payne, the plaintiff’s attorney, told CBS News.
No, they don’t. Safe workplace, yes, of course, but ensure that employees respect their coworkers’ gender pronouns, no – not what Payne means by “gender pronouns,” which is pronouns that don’t match the sex of the pronoun-haver and thus require extra attention for people to remember to use. If employees are calling a guy “her” because they think he’s too girly, that’s harassment, but forgetting to call him “them” is just forgetting.
According to Payne, the misgendering lawsuit against Nike is unique, though it is not the first time the company faced a lawsuit focusing on gender. Last year, four women filed a federal lawsuit against Nike, alleging it violated state and federal equal-pay laws and fostered a work environment that allowed sexual harassment.
And Lyles decided They wanted some of that for Themself.
The previous federal lawsuit had nothing to do with gender (except as a negative stereotype about people of the female sex, so as to justify differential pay or treatment), and everything to do with sex.
As to “misgendering,” that is the equivalent of “correct sexing.” How can it be harmful — actually harmful — to refer to someone linguistically as the sex that they physically are?
Sex is objectively observable. Gender is wholly subjective inside someone else’s head, and not observable at all. Dress or presentation is not necessarily a clue as to what someone’s claimed internal “gender identity” is. “Gender” can be anything anybody wants to make up, and it can change in an instant. It’s not determinable by any reasonably objective measure. It’s possible to mistake someone’s sex, but it is objectively determinable: readily, in most cases, and with more in depth observation and testing, in others.
In conversations with people, one usually uses the pronouns “you” and “yours”. As has been pointed out here before, s/he, his, her, they, them, their are not used in face to face conversations, but more often used in instances where the person being pronouned about is not present. So part of this is the policing of speech that they are not present to hear. They are expecting others to report for them; policing this will require informants.
Also, “they” is usually used to refer to a group of people, which, usually, an individual is not. Ophelia’s comments also show how clunky and odd this usage is on the written page. At least neologisms like xe don’t require unlearning years of grammar to employ.
Yeah, one of the big sticking points for me is that there’s no way to objectively demonstrate what ‘gender’ you have the legal right to be recognised as.
There is a useful and legitimate function for the singular ‘they’–when you don’t know the sex of the person you’re discussing. ‘When the new project manager takes over, they’ll need to review the budget again.’ It makes no sense, though, to use it to refer to an actual specific person.
I think the “real” and “significant” “harm” caused by misgendering boils down to: didn’t do what I want, and this angers me.
This could be interesting. On the one hand, ‘they’ will need to demonstrate real and significant harm to even have standing to sue. On the other hand, if the Oregon court operates in a similar way to the UK courts, that will be easy. All ‘they’ will have to do is say ‘they’ have been harmed, and the judge will roll over and play dead.
But…Nike has a shit load of money and lawyers, and it won’t be an easy ride for ‘they’.
If transgender people manage to come up with legitimate, convincing evidence that misgendering does in fact cause them “real and significant harm,” they can forget about being accepted into the military. They’re automatic 4-F. Imagine how the enemy could exploit a vulnerability like that without even breaking a sweat.
And, perhaps the weirdest part; ‘preferred’ pronouns are all third person. ‘You’ is—blessedly—gender-neutral.
So, the TRAs are demanding to control the language other people use. When they aren’t even present.
So do they require continuous monitoring of all the private speech of their entire workplace? A pronoun police-force like the Stasi, with every 3rd of 4th coworker reporting to the politburo?
It seems unfair that only Trans folks get to play the being offended by pronouns game – so from now on I will be using “Worshipful Master James” in place of *all* my personal pronouns.
Or as it is from now: Worshipful Master James would like to announce that Worshipful Master James now wishes that “Worshipful Master James” be used in place of all Worshipful Master James pronouns. Worshipful Master James hope that you will respect Worshipful Master James wishes in this matter and Worshipful Master James’ lawyers are on standby if you don’t.